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E-commerce vendor mParticle raises $17.5 million

E-commerce customer data platform mParticle has raised $17.5 million in a Series B funding round led by new investor Bain Capital Ventures along with existing investor Social Capital.

MParticle’s platform aims to unify the data that retailers collect across their analytics and marketing programs, as well as other data they collect across online and in apps. The vendor plans to use the new funding to launch more products and to grow its operations. The $17.5 million brings the company's total capital raised to $37 million since its launch in 2013. MParticle says it is on track to grow its sales 400% this year and that it captures data on more than $5 billion worth of e-commerce transactions.

"Too much valuable customer data is being ignored," says Michael Katz, CEO and co-founder of mParticle. "For the first time, brands can get a complete view of the customer journey across their web, app, and server data, not to mention the data generated by all their SaaS tools. With this unified perspective, they can at last deliver on the promise of multi-screen personalization and marketing across paid and CRM channels."

Scott Friend, who led the investment for Bain Capital Ventures, will join the mParticle board. Max Clark also has joined the company as the chief revenue officer to lead global sales. Prior to joining mParticle, Clark was vice president of sales for the Oracle Social Cloud.

Over the past year, mParticle launched several major new product upgrades including support for Apple TV and Google Inc.’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). It also doubled the number of vendors it integrates with, going from 60 to 120 and launched integrations with three major cloud-based marketing vendors—Adobe Systems Inc., Oracle Corp. and Salesforce.com Inc. It also launched new services that help match consumers’ online activities with brands across multiple devices and introduced new encryption and security features.

MParticle also recently introduced Profiles API, an application programming interface that enables businesses to query a customer record in their mParticle account and append that customer data to an existing system for a more complete view of the shopper. For example, a customer service rep responding to a help desk ticket would be able to review a customer's behavior across web and app, understand if she is a frequent shopper, whether she prefers to interact via the retailer’s app or its website and what they she was doing leading up to the issue she called about.